


Colours

by inK_AddicTion



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Classism, F/F, Implied Sexual Content, adding tags as I go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-24
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-08-10 19:48:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 18
Words: 9,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7858768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inK_AddicTion/pseuds/inK_AddicTion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gem colonies destroyed planets. Like parasites, they came to them and hollowed them out from within, and when they were done, all that was left was dead, crumbling earth and shattered rock.<br/>-<br/>Pink Diamond knew yellow and blue, she knew white and pink. But Earth was so much more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. red, brown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink Diamond is born.

Pink Diamond is born among colourless destruction. 

It is a dead planet, crumbling and used, its riches long-plundered by thousands of kindergartens and the other fragments and snippets of gem colonies. She claws herself out of the dirt, shattering the world around her, jigsaw pieces falling apart as her too-huge form utilises the pressure building up by the weight of this gravid world to blow it apart. 

What remains of the ground is cracked through with haphazard puncture wounds. A shattered tower leers on the horizon. Hazy winds scurry listless scrubs of grit to bite her cheeks. Everything is brown or it is lurid, lazy crimson, like dried bloodstains. Her skin is ruddy red here, in the fat orange light of the dying suns. There are three of them, and each one oozes infectious orange clouds, sickly and wan.

The collapsing ground trembles under her first steps into the wreckage. Shards crunch into compacted sand under her feet; they go unnoticed, a Diamond’s skin is tough. She is seconds old, and her first sight is the destruction of her own birth. 

Diamonds are made to destroy. The crumbling ruins are to please her, she thinks. Seconds old, the only world she has ever known is rusty-red and brackish-brown, heat-withered and ruined. 

A geyser erupts at her elbow, and the trailing edge of her gossamer skirt is caught in it, flung burning back against her leggings. She reaches down to feel herself, testing her firm calves, thighs, hips, breasts, round to cup a bicep with one hand, interlacing her fingers and flexing against them. Perfectly formed. She feels strong. She touches her gemstone, the sharp clear facets of it, how smooth and hard it feels. 

This is what an empress feels, she thinks. She knows that that is what she is made to be. 

She raps her knuckles against it experimentally. A shivery feeling runs through her projection. It feels strange, so she does it again, her free hand sliding into her hair, candyfloss pink and separated into delicate, huge tufts, like the petals of a flower. Soft.

Texture immerses her, and Pink Diamond wanders around in the collapsing planet, sidestepping the yawning, toothless mouths of dirt cracking open under her feet with the dreamy, innocent curiosity of a child. The far-distant tower feels smooth under fingers, but cold, unlike her gem. The ground feels gritty and fine. The heat of the geysers feels wet, beading on her skin. The hot, still half-melted glass of her emergence clings to her hand like the planet’s silvery lifeblood, tinted crimson by her own skin underneath.

By virtue of the knowledge which all gems have written into their gemstone, Pink Diamond knows she is not alone in the universe. Later, she will be told that she isn’t supposed to wander off to explore a planet on the brink of collapse.

But for now, she is alone among a field of vast desolation.

It soon begins to feel less like victory, and more like loneliness.


	2. acid green

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink Diamond learns subjugation and meets her fellow Diamonds.

The ship the Diamonds come for her in is green. Acid neon throbs from every surface, creating endless stark reflections distorted in the ship’s walls. Pink watches herself warp, makes faces, laughs; irritably, Yellow Diamond strides back to drag her along.

There are no textures here save greasy smoothness, but there are lights, insubstantial, wispy like promises, lights that click and whirr, lights that blaze from screens, glaring lights barring cells imprisoning incompetent gems. She touches the barriers, laughing when it shocks her fingers. The sensation is electric, alive, leaves her tingling. 

It is a place of seamless soullessness, and she finds the contrast interesting to the anguished decay of her birth. This is a different version of imperial might; Pink Diamond soaks in it. 

White Diamond’s skin glows wraithlike green in the light; her harsh eyes are forbidding. But Pink Diamond makes herself soft and giggly, laughing at every new thing, reaching out to play with White Diamond’s fingers until the disdain melts into curiosity. Reserved, glacial Blue Diamond is easy; Pink only has to kneel, lift her veil, kiss closed eyelids with sweet tenderness. Yellow Diamond is easier still. To entrance her, Pink Diamond only has to laugh.

She is a Diamond - made to lead, conquer, dominate. Her fellow Diamonds are immoveable checks on that thirst. White Diamond, glittering, calls Pink “perfect”, and in the next breath, howling winds lift Pink Diamond and throw her bodily against one of the vile green walls. 

Disbelieving fury races hot and bitter on her tongue. It is a conditioned response coded into her gem, attacks on her are attacks on her authority, and Pink is a new thing, arrogant in her youth.

“It seems almost a shame,” says Yellow Diamond, circling Pink Diamond like a vulture, eyes flashing. “Such a bright spirit.” 

“It must be done,” says White Diamond, coldly. The shadows make her sickly jade all over, like a worshipful monument to the infected.

“She will not learn, otherwise,” Blue Diamond says, almost inaudibly, the deepsea green of long abandoned things.

White Diamond’s heels rap on the floor, then her boot twists and presses down on the soft flesh of Pink Diamond’s cheek, forcing her head into the floor. Any movement only brings a harder punch of wind against her gem where she feels it most strongly.

“How do you feel?” White Diamond asks.

Pink grits her teeth and glares at her. She is unable to move, held completely captive by White’s authority, helpless. Powerless. It is horrifically new, a brutal lesson.

“Good.” White Diamond stares down at her in absolute power. Her eyes are bitter, empty, cold, the strength in her cannot be contested, perfect, unbreakable. “You will make the gems you rule feel this.”

Pink’s tongue flicks out to taste her lips. She reaches up to White’s calf, eyes lidded - interested despite herself. It is her nature. Diamonds seek power where they can.

“Remember it.”

Face pressed into an acid green floor, Pink does not intend to forget.


	3. white

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink Diamond lives under White’s control.

White Diamond’s palaces are, well, white.

They are grand labyrinths of towering pale stone corridors, giggling pearls scampering over and leaping lightly from wall top to wall top, light of foot, melodious songs calling to one another. They are sweet things, pretty dancers and enchanting singers, tall and slender with their smooth oval gems set in their forehead, faintly champagne-tinted hair swept up behind their heads. They simper, sigh, fold themselves together perfectly around White’s throne, kissing her heels and the hems of her coat, perfectly obedient, perfectly vapid, like porcelain dolls with very little substance, transparent against the flat, gleaming whiteness.

Pink has tried jumping from wall to wall like White’s little pearls before, and toppled three before she resigned herself to the clumsiness of her massive, diamond-strong form. Instead, she makes do with batting a graceful, surefooted pearl off her perch every now and then with the ease of a cat playing with sugar-mice. There is one pearl in particular that Pink likes to single out - the only one who is nearly brave enough to scowl every time Pink flicks her off the wall just as she climbs back up again. 

It makes for hours of amusement for a bored Diamond with no purpose.

The walls are patterned with onyx sometimes; the grey shadows grow long in the dusk of Homeworld. Outside the windows, Pink can see tints of blue in the deep dark sky, and the white balanced points of stars. She spends a long time studying the outside world; windows in White’s palaces are rare, windows that aren’t pretending to be mirrors are rarer.

Pink is the most vibrant thing in White’s palaces, her radiant rose raiment and hue making her stand out like a sore thumb. The colourlessness is dull, repetitive, maddening. 

So she learns to find colour in White Diamond herself, the faintest powdery blue flush over her cheeks, hints and smudges. Pink comes to know them all, intimately, comes to know how to distract White from whatever she is doing.

She snatches at these infestiminal flickers of power over White to appease the growing thirst within her, the lust for domination, destruction. She is a Diamond, it is what she is made for, and the aimlessness of a powerless life trapped on Homeworld begins to wear at her. 

Everything is so white. Wherever she goes, Pink cannot escape the inextricable strings White Diamond holds around her. 

Pink Diamond learns to flaunt herself like a pearl, giggly and fluttery, shatters White’s pretty dolls in fits of jealousy. Pink’s singing voice is not chiming, it is husky, rough; her dancing is more exuberant than graceful. 

Yet, when they are done, and White Diamond leans up to kiss her tenderly on the forehead - so carefully, gently, as if she is afraid Pink will break like a pearl - Pink grits her teeth.  

White Diamond treats her as if she is a particularly robust pearl, and not a Diamond. Sometimes, Pink wonders if she even knows the difference.


	4. gold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink Diamond explores freedom with Yellow Diamond.

Yellow Diamond’s fingertips trace Pink’s nape with respectful caution. Her other hand is quiescent against the arm of her throne, pinned by Pink’s fingers encircling it like a vice. She watches Pink with the slitted stare of a predator, doesn’t move.

In the soft glow of the screens that surround them, Yellow’s skin is brushed with faint shimmering gold hints; subtly, she glitters. Her eyelashes are thick, curling under a layer of oil, the fat black lines of her striking eyeliner a flat contrast to her molten eyes. Her trapped wrist under Pink’s hand is hot to the touch, and her heat radiates through Pink’s leggings where she is sat on Yellow’s lap. 

It is a familiar position with White, but Yellow seems to delight in being the opposite of what Pink expects. For a start, Yellow isn’t afraid to let Pink fight back in a strange, uneasy struggle of strength between them.

Yellow’s painted nails become claws, suddenly, and scrape roughly down to her collar, scoring harsh lines into her skin - not quite enough to break it. Pink jumps and hisses. Yellow’s eyes, half-lidded like a dim harvest moon, flick lazily to meet hers in an unrepentant challenge.

“Too much?” Yellow checks.

Pink blinks at her, a little bewildered at the seemingly out of character consideration. It is strangely thrilling. It makes her want to hit back. Her fingers curl, unsure, her own natural instincts to conquer and destroy warring with what she knows of intimacy with White. Pearl-like intimacy. Yellow’s lips twitch in amusement.

“The longer we do this, the more it becomes obvious that White Diamond does not have the first idea what she’s doing with you.”

Pink bristles a little at that - White Diamond is their leader after all, even if Pink is inclined to agree, even if that’s the entire reason she is here. The temptation to break away, to rebel, to seize back control, power, and strength, somehow all bundled up in the promise in the twist of Yellow’s wry lip.

“I think Blue would try to shatter me if I tried to make her behave half as meekly as White expects you to.” Yellow’s eyes glitter with brilliant, bright fire, a little mad, burning, frenzied. She grips Pink’s hair and yanks it painfully. “You’re a Diamond!” she snarls, “Act like it!”

Pink can’t stop it; she lashes out, hard, and the slap echoes viciously. Yellow turns her head, her cheek bruiselike gold, and grins. 

“Better.”

Gold are the prominent, boldly displayed lipstick stains that mark her collar and throat afterwards, toothy marks worried into her neck, scoring lines and flakes of gold polish chipped off from the force. 

Gold is the feeling the look in White’s eyes gives her, half-incandescent with fury at the thought of Yellow laying her hands on Pink, half-betrayed at the thought of Pink inviting such attention herself, blown over with helplessness. 

Gold is the fire in Pink’s chest when she knows that she won't be White’s servant again. 


	5. blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blue Diamond teaches Pink about the nature of power.

Blue Diamond’s court is a palace of whispers. The gems here all seem to float, untethered to the ground, unattached to life. Their eyes are blank and shuttered, cold blue like ice, not reflective mirrors like White’s servants, but deep, dark, sucking, like brackish tidal pools. Patterned, meandering luminescence pulses faintly underneath blue-black drapes, like deepsea mushrooms, or far distant constellations.

Pink Diamond’s skin is bruiselike purple in the indigo twilight. Only her gem and eyes remain bright brilliant pink, blazing scarlet like fire amid all these placid, moonlit gems, the swishes of their cloaks and hoods and implacable, mysterious eyes blinking the only murmur of noise. Shadows collect in wraithlike pockets under the hollows of her eyes and the curve of her jaw, but she bathes in the reflective stillness.

It is as far from Yellow Diamond’s glaring screens and White Diamond’s colourless, faceless labyrinths as it is possible to be. The gems here are shrouded and quiet, but all of them move with an enviable sense of purpose.

Pink Diamond’s purpose has always been to conquer, to crack open the darknesses of planets until the meek shards became her own seat of power. She was created superior to her underlings, dominant and powerful. And yet, surrounded by all of these gems with their efficiently silent lives, Pink Diamond has never been more useless, more ornamental.

“Blue,” Pink whispers. “Blue, do you think White will ever let me have a colony?”

Blue Diamond, quiescent on her palanquin beside Pink, painstakingly turns her head so that Pink can stare into the darkness where her eyes ought to be, and slowly lifts her arm to place her long-fingered hand on Pink’s knee. Accompanying every laborious movement is the hiss and gurgle of running water - from whence is impossible to tell.

“No.” Her voice, awe-inspiring and reserved, is nonetheless as soft as cold, ice-bound Blue can ever be.

“You don’t?” despairs Pink Diamond. “You think - I’ll be powerless forever? Useless?”

“No.”

Earnestly covering Blue’s cold hand with her own larger, warmer one, Pink squeezes it, gently. “Please, Blue,” she implored. “Tell me - how I can make her - Yellow defends you and all you do is ignore her. White…” Pink trails off.

“Authority is an illusion,” says Blue Diamond, with quiet, controlled effort. “To have it, you must choose to know that you do.”

Blue Diamond’s hand slips off her knee and falls away. Evidently exhausted, the elder Diamond lets it rest in her lap.

Uncertainly, Pink looks down at her own hands, spreads them in her lap and runs her fingertips over the palms. Hands that have touched White, that White has kissed, hands that White knows and trusts to never be a threat. Unlike Yellow Diamond, or Blue Diamond.

“An illusion,” she repeats, quietly. 

Unseen in the dimness of Blue Diamond’s court, her gem glows and aches faintly. There is already strength and power in everything that makes Pink a diamond. Perhaps it is time to act like one. Her way.


	6. black

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink forces White to give her the Earth colony.

The void between planets is absorbent black, broken only by glorious galaxies of colour and the brilliant light of the stars. In the immersive velvet silence, the fabric of the world is sliced open by a swift ship. Every panel is black, reflective, the symbol of the Authority etched prominently. Within, the Diamonds argue around a holographic map of one tiny G-type star’s nine planetary bodies, only one interesting.

Pink Diamond scowls down at the planet Earth, tuning out Yellow Diamond’s enthusiastic extolling of its qualities. Quietly, but forcefully, Blue Diamond reminds her that a greater percentage of the planet is water, her own domain. White Diamond’s sharp eyes scan the feed their scout-ships are sending back to them with greedy ambitiousness intrinsic to Diamonds.

“I want it,” Pink interrupts, ringingly. “I want this planet and I will have it.”

The other Diamonds silence, taken aback by her assertiveness. It is Blue Diamond, lovely and cool, who speaks up. “Justify your claim.”

“Oh, come now-” White begins, a little irritably.

“I don’t see why Pink Diamond should not have a chance to air her claim like the rest of us,” Yellow Diamond says quellingly. White Diamond’s lip curls into a sneer as she steps back, waving Pink on.

The darkness from the extinguished lights casts black shadows over the faces of the other Diamonds, exaggerating the deep clefts of their eyes in their faces, the lines of their mouths. Blue Diamond is nothing but a pool of shadow. Yellow Diamond’s eyes glow faintly in the dimness, fiery-yellow-orange. Pink Diamond clears her throat and looks down at the map of Earth, eyes glittering with cupidity.

“There is no reason for me not to take it,” she says. “Time enough has passed since my emergence to give me more experience than any of you had. I am sure you recall my experiments.” Her voice drops a little on the last word, deliberately evoking the thought of more sensual experiments than the ones on gem-type she actually means.

It works. Yellow takes care not to meet White’s eyes. White’s jaw firms. Blue Diamond’s lips curl into a slow smile under her hood. White is beginning to get that obstinate look that Pink recognises all too well, so Pink hurries on before she is stopped.

“Oh, it would be wonderful to not have to leech off your charity, White,” she says, changing tack abruptly with a soft, beseeching voice. Calculatedly, Pink grips the table, leans forward, pushes out her chest, and hoods her eyes. “Please, say that I can!”

White Diamond wavers, caught between pleasure at the flattering appeal to her authority and her own unwillingness to let Pink go. Blue Diamond leans back, self-satisfied as a well-fed cat.

“Oh White,” Pink entreats,  _ “please.” _

“Very well then!” White Diamond says roughly, crossing the room in a few quick steps to gather Pink tightly to her, her eyes and gem agleam in a way that sends a thrill through Pink, “You will have your planet!”


	7. loam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink steps foot on Earth.

Earth’s air is blustery and summery as it floods in through the ship door. The wide ramp thuds into the thick dark soil. Subservient gems look to Pink Diamond for instruction.

She is awestruck. Sunlight gilds the ship silver. The foreign planet has thick bushy green grass, seared away to expose dark soil writhing with grubs and organic life. Her boots raise compacted thuds from the force of her steps as she steps onto Earth soil.

“You’re mine,” she breathes. “Mine.  _ Mine.” _

The breeze caresses her. The world goes taut, dead still. The birds have flown. The animals have run. And the Earth under her feet  _ trembles. _

Her awareness sifts through layers of living breathing earth to rock underneath. She rolls her shoulders back with a rapturous sigh. Rich, fertile, begging to be plundered. Begging to be  _ used. _

“And I will,” she promises. 

She takes one step, then another, another. There is so much space around her that Pink Diamond is all but lost in it. 

She is picking up her pace. 

Her cultivated slink is losing some of its slow, sensuous movement as she loses herself in the exhilaration of a world that has plenty of space to fit her. On Homeworld, space is as much of a resource as everything else. Her pearl is valiantly trying to keep up, but Pink Diamond is faster. 

She is going faster, until she is running, her boots pounding the earth, the hot sun burning down on her back. The earth breathes with richness and vibrancy, dares her on. 

Faster, faster. 

Her long legs stretch, a burn in her body that she has never felt before. She starts off jolting, uncertain, but the further she runs the smoother she does, until she finds a rhythm. 

A split in the world yawns ahead, the craggy lip of a cliff diving down into a valley. Pink Diamond grins and forces herself faster, ruthlessly challenging and conquering her body’s protest. She experiences a moment of doubt. The jump is long. 

But she is a  _ Diamond,  _ and unconquerable!

She leaps. Impossibly, she soars through the air, unrestrained, weightless, incredible. 

At the last possible moment, the earth underneath her churns and surrenders. Rock surges out of the valleyside to catch her as she falls. The impact punches the breath from her body and she rolls in the dirt, mud in her hair, rips in her beautiful skirt, and she laughs madly, breathlessly. 

The sound of her glee bounces off the hills and echoes in the valleys of her planet, her Earth.

Pink Diamond kicks off her boots impatiently, digs her toes into the soil of her planet, feeling its utter capitulation to her power, and laughs until she can laugh no more. The sun warms her, the rich brown soil is earthy and smells of crushed organics. She can feel the earth thrumming through every lump of grit. Her escort are far behind, weak in this new land.

Never before has Pink Diamond felt such absolute freedom.


	8. grey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink sets up her colony and White presents her with a gift.

There is a peculiar colourlessness in Earthen skies after rain.

  
The scarred dirt is grey under the spent clouds, puddles of dirty water oozing into crumbling dead soil. Spires jut like pointing fingers, their edges misty in an unsteady dawn’s crepuscular light. The pallid rays cannot penetrate the grim rock tunnels hunching around the swollen bases of the spires, like blisters, leading into the cavernous underground depths of Pink’s palace.

  
In deference to her visitor’s preferences, Pink Diamond is outside the humid caves, in the wintery dimness smattered by hazy, lacklustre rain, arm in arm with White Diamond.

  
“You are young for this.”

  
“ _White_.”

  
White Diamond’s eyes are interminable, blank, but underneath the roiling fog barrier, there is old caution. White Diamond’s skin is muted by her upswept collar, like trodden snow, her cloak long, heavy, and damp. Pearls, winter shadows, ghost along at her heels. The wind blasts through the colonnades of smog between the stone spires, screaming like a slalom race; White’s cape sways, Pink’s gauzy skirt strains at its fastening.

  
White speaks with slow consideration. “When I was your age, I was still labouring under my mentor, let alone taking command myself.”

  
Seizing White, Pink immobilises her. Even at eye-level, White looks down on her. “What?! But I thought-”

  
White’s grey gaze is distant, expressionless, groping back through many centuries to the dawn of time. Her epaulette is rigid under Pink’s hot hand.

  
“Brown Diamond. Weak, but wise. My superior until I shattered her.”

  
“I never…” Pink’s voice shakes, oddly distressed.

  
White cups Pink’s face between her chilly marble hands. Her stiff lips twitch a smile, eyes guttering like twin supernovae. “My Pink Diamond, there is much you don’t know yet.”

  
Pink covers White’s firm, unyielding hand on her cheek with her own. White pulls away, thumb smoothing over Pink’s knuckles.

  
“Which is why I have brought you a gift.” Without breaking eye-contact, she lowers herself, offering her gauntlet, fingers spread. A nimble pearl leaps onto her hand, ribbonwhip thin, round blue eyes, glossy oval stone, like all of White’s pearls.

  
“Take her,” White commands.

  
Obediently, Pink spreads her hands. The pearl’s weight is negligible.

  
“A pearl…?”

  
“That pearl contains every scrap of information from every colony under my rule.”

  
White closes Pink’s hands over the pearl, who curls up in a ball to avoid getting crushed. “She will serve you well, and you may contact me through her whenever you please.”

  
White kisses her cheek tenderly. Her hands frame Pink’s, their bodies lean towards each other, breath intermingling. White’s presence is deathly cold; a pleasant shiver squirms down Pink’s spine. Pink tilts her head for a kiss, White releases her instead.

  
Abruptly White turns away into the greyness towards her ship, metallic in the dawn, sleet sharpening the edges of her armoured shoulders to shiny flint.

  
Pink hesitates. “White!”

  
White deigns to stop, half-turning with regal arrogance.

  
“Why did you shatter Brown Diamond?”

  
White scowls like a splinter of glass. “It was time for a change.”


	9. sand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink explores sunlight and warmth.

There are vast areas of desolation on Earth that still yet harbour life.

The rolling dunes edge misty, insubstantial lines against a brilliant blue sky, the colour of shattered sapphires. The sun is as fierce and unblinking as Yellow Diamond’s eye. Tiny, spiny green bushes sprout from the barren sand against all the odds, clinging on stubbornly to life. Pink marvels about their incredible perseverance in such an inhospitable place.

Not so inhospitable to gems, however.

Pink Diamond, incubated in the yellow fire of a planet’s melting core, laps up the warmth like a lazy cat. It prickles hotly on the exposed skin of her midriff and arms, tickles her cheeks. It superheats the silk of the cushion she sprawls across, until the little pearls hiding under the fold of Pink’s skirt squirm in discomfort. Pearls are made from cool blue waters in secrecy and warm darkness, not to endure the raging heat of the desert sun. They are too good servants to complain, but the fragile pearls are evidently struggling more than the nearby lounging quartzes, who sun themselves like great white-maned lions.

She squints at the lanky pale thing White has left her and grimaces. It isn’t really to her taste. Far too quiet, too servile. It doesn’t talk enough. A classical pearl in every sense. Not at all confident and amusing – sometimes a little too boisterous – like Pink’s favoured quartzes, though she supposes a disobedient pearl would be useless.

It makes her wonder. Quartzes with the minds of pearls, servile, unquestioning, loyal, selfless in every sense of the word, yet strong enough to endure anything Pink could throw at it. A bodyguard.

Pink digs her fingers through the yellow sand, feeling the heat retreat the further down she burrowed. The soil was wet, and when she lifts her hand, brown dirt sifts between her fingers. Brown. She shivers, suddenly cold, and her free hand inadvertently touches the flawless diamond on her stomach. The chill in White’s eyes seemed to reach her through memory, firmly dashing her pleasure in the hot sun.

“Time for a change,” she whispers.

A bodyguard to protect a Diamond, who could make life flourish in the most deserted and desolate places on Earth.

There is movement under her skirt. The white pearl leaps nimbly onto her thigh and runs up to Pink’s raised knee, balancing high above everything else. Pink frowns slightly as all the quartzes surrounding her look up as one, greedy and transfixed.

“My Diamond?” The white pearl asks. “Would my Diamond like this pearl to dance for her?”

“Fine,” Pink grinds out, annoyed. The white pearl smiles a little coolly and rises to her tiptoes.

Below, the quartzes gather, immediately compromised in the hope of a pleasant distraction. They would be useless guards if someone decided to creep up on her now.

A loyal quartz is what she needs, thinks Pink. A loyal quartz whose head couldn’t be turned by a pretty white pearl, and spared no thought to itself.


	10. maroon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink creates a new gem.

The majority of Pink Diamond’s work is done in sticky maroon darkness, in a certain cave set deep into the cliffs, where damp crawls off the walls like shiny slick cobwebs and the lurid glow of the pink injectors are stained scarlet by the wavering cave light. The first rose quartzes have emerged underground, nursed deep within both the womb of the Earth and the protected gatehouse of Pink’s palace. The raw red cliffs, the colour of a peeled scab, are crusted over with holes like bleeding pores picked into the rock, the exit holes of the first batch.

Yellow Diamond’s skin is tinted primal reddish orange. She walks beside Pink, flagrant scarlet like fresh blood herself, the sharp staccato snap of their steps echoing loudly. They walk in step, like the military empresses they are. Pink Diamond’s notes hover on a small screen, and Yellow scans them, her stare powerful with intense focus as she devours the words. Pink chats about the process.

“I used the new quartz we found,” Pink is explaining. “I augmented the protective capabilities as much as I could – the current batch are undergoing psychological testing to see how much I’ve managed to encode.”

“And how is that coming along?” Yellow asks, sparing Pink a sharp glance. Her honey-ocherous eyes are as deep and hot as always. She has a look similar to that of a hunting hawk – being pinned under it is to be assessed with the full force of Yellow Diamond’s fierce and fiery intellect.

“Well enough. They seem to have potential – resilient as any other quartz, and the capability to control plant life is unprecedented. I haven’t tested it off this planet yet, I’m hoping the results can be replicated in a different organic environment.” In her element, Pink radiates as much confidence as a lounging cat soaking up the sun of Yellow Diamond’s attention.

“You’ve outdone yourself.”

Pink blushes at the praise, her skin reddening as if with fever. “If I hadn’t had your input –“

“These quartzes are solely yours, Pink. Don’t underestimate that.” Yellow cocks her head, focus diverted to a maroonish gem standing guard at one of the doors, a bright pink quartz gemstone on her shoulder, one half of her head a riot of reddish curls, the other thick and wavy. She has a distinctive mark on her cheek, and a bucktooth.

“Yes, that’s one of them. 1AC3TB, if I am not mistaken.” The rose quartz, honoured beyond belief that Pink Diamond herself has remembered her designation, bursts into silent tears, saluting as hard as she can.

Yellow Diamond evaluates 1AC3TB with a critical eye. “Inefficient design,” she comments. “Are they always… leaking?”

Pink grimaces. “I’ve not yet managed to streamline the process for mass production yet. I – I’m not actually sure why that happens. A defect I haven’t worked out yet.”

“Well,” Yellow says humorously, “at least their transparency means you’d see right through them if they ever tried to betray you.”

Pink laughs. “There is that.”


	11. lilac

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink learns about the trouble one of her pearls is causing in her court.

Pearls are ideally placed to hear whispers. They are invisible, decorations that pretend deafness so well that even their owners forget about them at times. Pink has never been good at deviousness, but her pearl delights in it.

Everything is blue and grey, outside the windows that dot the Sea Spire like breaks in a wave, roaring, rushing water can be seen, violently frothing blue, white speckled. The light inside the spire is dim watery grey, soft and blurry at the edges, like a half-erased pencil sketch. The pastel colours of her pearl are softer and paler than those of ruddy-bright Pink herself; inside the spire, the pearl takes on a lilac hue, like a slowly setting sky.

Pink’s pearl goes to places that Pink is too large to reach, listens to whispers that Pink is too revered to hear. And so, it is from her little pink pearl that Pink Diamond discovers what the _other pearl_ has been doing.

It is dark; the _other pearl_ has been sent away to ensure that Pink Diamond’s chambers at the palace are clean after Yellow Diamond’s visit. The _other pearl_ makes Pink uncomfortable. She reminds Pink of White in that moment in the rain, she makes her think of change and diamond shards. It would be churlish to send the gift back to White, though as time passes and the pale, slippery-lucid thing remains in Pink’s court, distracting her loyal gems, the more Pink Diamond imagines risking White’s disfavour with a convenient accident.

Lavender light is silken across the walls; the atmosphere is soft and cool like the inside of dewy morning glory, damp with the fine spray from the seawater. Pink’s pearl curls comfortably in her Diamond’s hand, her starmap freckles like the hairs on a strawberry. She reports; her Diamond listens.

Her pink pearl tells her about the entrance hall of the old palace gate. Too small for a diamond to enter, it has been relegated to a maintenance corridor once Pink began residing in her completed palace. Pink thought it silent, unused, empty, save the occasional scuttling technician.

Her pearl whispers a different story.

Pink Diamond’s pink pearl, glorying in her betrayal, tells her about an undercover secret orgy of gladiatorial combat, celebration and display not meant for their Diamond’s eyes. In the old entrance hall, decked pale purple in flickering maintenance lights, her pink pearl describes rose quartzes, amethysts, jaspers, carnelians, with their agates, with bismuths, peridots, corals, prehnites, all rubbing together, in a frenzy of exhilaratingly hidden rulebreaking. There is something exotic in it, whispers her pink pearl, not immune to the sights she has seen, something compelling. Oh, the quartzes – swaggering, trumpeting, boastfully strutting in their prime, like peacocks posturing their glossy feathers for one timid little peahen’s approval.

“The _other pearl_ makes herself like a queen, my Diamond,” her pink pearl says, gleefully treacherous.

“Like a Diamond,” Pink Diamond corrects, “in her Sky Arena of a dusty maintenance corridor stuffed with defects, surveying my troops.”


	12. puce

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pearl is punished by the Quartzes.

Pink Diamond decides on a public punishment, in the Sky Arena, open to the gloriously vivid red setting sun, dusk harsh thick purple like bruises, bleeding electric pinks. The stone of the arena is puce, everything tinted rose-ish, the blood of the combatants slickly wetly gleaming in the falling darkness. The tournaments have been satisfyingly vicious; poofed gems scatter the edges of the arena, their facets glint and glitter. More quartzes wait, penned like beasts under the wings of the theatre of violence, waiting for their turn to act. The atmosphere is lurid and thirsty, horrors are excusable here.

The white pearl waits, docile, passively uninterested; a good act. Pink wonders if she knows many of the sweating quartzes grappling like animals.

Pink Diamond twitches a finger, smirks. She reclines, sensuous in her complete control, as the white pearl is shoved hard into the arena, a burly squad of grinning amethysts ringing her.

“Begin,” orders Pink.

The amethysts crack their knuckles. Gems flash and glow as weapons are summoned. The audience leans forward, anticipating a quick bloodthirsty beating.

 _“My Diamond!”_ The terrified pearl squeaks in entreaty. Her fear is delicious to the quartzes. They look at the pearl with naked and raw hunger, the hunger of primal things born to hurt and kill.

“My Pearl,” purrs Pink Diamond. “I thought seeing as you show such a preference for my quartzes when my back is turned, I’d give you a chance to learn how _they_ dance for me.”

A nasty laughter rushes through the audience. Her pink pearl is scanning for the ones who remain silent, the sinners, pasty-faced with guilt and horror, as the wolves close in around the helpless rabbit about to be torn limb from limb for the viewing pleasure of their beloved Diamond.

The amethysts close in. The pearl’s shoulders slump in resignation. The first strike hits with the crack of an unrestrained blow. Like a ragdoll, the force of the blow knocks her across the stone floor – bravely she keeps quiet, tries to scramble up again. Another quartz grabs her by the hair and tosses her across the ring. They play catch with her, sniggering.

The pearl is silent and unresisting.

 “Do not crack her,” Pink reminds her soldiers magnanimously. “I should hate to deprive a few filthy defectives of their favourite pastime.”

Laughter, some jeering. They are brutal and hungry – the catspaw games are not enough.

An amethyst, handsome in her prime, does not disappoint. She lifts her head, the violent ruddy light haloing her, stamps down hard on the pearl’s hand. The fingers break like kindling. Another stomp, further up. The pearl’s thin arm snaps, bloody broken bone protruding from the skin. The amethyst grabs the pearl by the arm, drags her up to show her to the audience. Her head is lolling on her neck, she is sobbing, trembling from the shock.

Pearl meets Pink Diamond’s eyes. She smiles, and does not cry out.

Pink Diamond tries to laugh. It sounds hollow, unnerved.


	13. scarlet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rebellion breaks out.

Freedom is a contagious ideal and violence is the language of power. No one understands this better than Pink Diamond, struggling and scraping and scratching for authority amidst the oppressiveness of her fellow Diamonds; even the most gentle of them, Yellow, needed to have Pink’s independence clawed into her. Authority is an illusion, as fragile as the light that makes their bodies.

Pink Diamond knows this.

She kneels in the dirt and runs her fingertips over a crashed and smashed ship’s fragments. Like all of Yellow Diamond’s new gem tech, it feels somehow greasy and smooth, like unwashed human hair or dirty marble. The fragments are freshly-pickled red, like sharp little gleaming red innards, tinkling through her fingers like gem shards. The whole ship is unfortunately scarlet, flagrant, obtrusive, like a snapping flag marking the beginning of a race, aggravating the bull.

There are no survivors. There are no gems, either. The sweating flint scout who brought her to the ship supposes that it was a ghost ship, piloted by the computers.

She shrinks beneath Pink Diamond’s glare. In the furious light from the setting sun, caught in that moment between dusk and daylight, when the sky is alive and on fire with the last bleed of the sun as it sinks over the lay of the land, pierced to death by a distant mountain outlined red and gold, the colourlessly grey flint shimmers delicate colours of crimson scarlet.

Pink Diamond’s communication hub went off-line three rotations ago. Maintenance fault. Gems have been going missing, without a trace – her own pearl, the _other pearl,_ possibly cracked or worse, vanished. Unruly organic wildlife, the reports say, regretfully. Ships crashing (more maintenance faults), crews deserting (more wildlife), buildings tumbling (cracks in the foundations), information disappearing (unreliable gem-tech). Tiny, petty disobediences, things that aren’t to bother a Diamond, things that pricked and niggled at her paranoia. Things are changing, slowly, mockingly, dragging it out like an animal bleeding its kill.

Her control is slipping, her illusion of the authority is beginning to wane as the light of this sun does. Pink Diamond’s hand shakes, she drops a few scattered fragments of blood red ship. They crash, unapologetically loud, grating against one another with the scrape of sparks. The sparks flare, uncontrolled, she smothers them quickly.

The ship wasn’t deserted as the flint suggests. Pink Diamond had sent her observations on the marine life of Earth to Blue Diamond (expressing the unsubtle suggestion that they should be seen soon) in secrecy, with a peridot she trusted. But of the peridot and the notes, there is no sign in the smoking wreckage.

The message rings across as loudly and clearly as her own to Blue Diamond has failed to. They will not permit her to contact the outside world beyond this Earth; there will be no way to discreetly summon her fellow Diamonds for support without declaring her weakness. She is alone.

She recognises the feeling inside her, from her lesson many years ago. Powerlessness.


	14. plum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink loses the Prime Kindergarten to the rebellion.

The sky is split like an overripe fruit, bloody and bruised purple, like intimate flesh bitten raw and sore. Injectors wilt, becoming flaccid, their proud tips shattered, leaking purplish fluid. The dark watching holes of the Prime Kindergarten are barren now, infertile. The rebels, like some sort of parasite, some sort of disease, have wreaked their wiles on Pink Diamond’s kindergarten and now it reeks, stagnant, infected, deserted of all gems.

Wounded, wombless, Pink Diamond is incandescent with fury. There is an emptiness inside her now, a uselessness. She exists to conquer and to destroy, but for the first time, Pink Diamond also realises that she was created to protect. She has nothing to protect. She cannot create more from herself. She hunches over, folds her arms around the gem on her stomach. A shuddery feeling runs through her projection, she moans, as if in pain.

Then she raises her head, breath hissing past her gritted teeth in violent pants. More soldiers are needed. More soldiers to throw at the rebels, half disintegrating into disloyalty, the other half vanishing without a trace, and all without success. There is no indication of a rebel base. The few gems she captured always prefer to die rather than betray their band of traitors. Pink Diamond wonders how she does it, _Rose Quartz, her own rose quartz,_ makes them loyal enough to die for an ideal that won’t ever materialise.

 _“I want more quartzes!”_ Pink Diamond screams. She is disjointed, her mind reeling with the broken injectors, fumbling blindly into the soil, ejecting necessary ingredients to bring about life, like stinking overripe fruit, turning to rot, fuzzing around the edges. “I need them! Find a way – make me more – _find Rose Quartz and shatter her!”_

“My – my Diamond…” A peridot whispers, turning milk white with terror when Pink Diamond immediately whirls to face her.

“What!?” She thunders, drawing herself up to her full height, shadowy in the dusk except for her eyes, brilliant and feverish with mad fury. Her pretty pink skin is marred with scratches, citrus-sweet blood seeping from the wounds, dark indigo flesh beneath the reddish- scarlet skin.

This is a blow that cannot be reasoned away. These rebels have gone too far, have struck too deep. Pink Diamond can no longer pretend that they will dissipate, wisp away like smoke, insubstantial and flickering. This is war, now, and she is losing.

“The beta site… My Diamond, it hasn’t been properly terraformed yet – our Lapis has vanished – it’s not ready for gem production-“ the unlucky peridot begins, shaking like a leaf in the face of a hurricane, uncaring, impersonal, absolute.

Pink Diamond’s body rears up, seems to vanish into the darkness. Her controlled exhale is felt through the warning rumble of an oncoming earthquake, shaking the ornate ceiling until dust sifts down, making the peridot sneeze. She immediately snaps into a salute, terrified.

Pink Diamond speaks again. “Make it ready, _now.”_

It is not a suggestion.

“Yes, my Diamond!” The peridot squeaks.


	15. ivory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink is questioned on her ability to deal with the rebellion.

“Pink.” Never has White Diamond’s voice sounded so bitterly cold, never has the glacial high arches and slopes of her disapproving brows looked so remote. Yellow Diamond follows a halfstep behind, arms crossed forbiddingly over her chest.

“Hello, Yellow, White!” Pink’s voice shakes, her hands fidget with each other. “Where is Blue?”

The Moonbase is cold. Colder than the chill of space, it rings with the emptiness of a place that no gem has set foot in years. It is colourless too, so Yellow and White are washed out until they blur together in shades of sickly ivory. They refuse to land on the war-torn surface of Earth. Only Blue still visits her there, and Blue is late. The door opens, all three turn expectantly towards it.

“Apologies for my tardiness,” Blue’s soft voice murmurs. She is silhouetted against the glaring white of her surroundings, seeped with black shadows. A watchfulness drifts in with her, but incrementally, Pink’s shoulders relax.

“Ship trouble?” asks Pink, too loudly. She has leapt to her feet.

 “She was attacked. Let’s cut to the chase shall we?” Yellow interjects flatly.

Pink’s head whips around. “Attacked? How –?”

“The rebels found me. The Crystal Gems. I lost my favourite sapphire,” Blue tells her. Pink listens, wide-eyed.

“You are at war. And frankly Pink, I question your ability to deal with it.” White’s words reverberate like bell tolls.

“I-“ Pink stammers. She turns from face to hard cold face, looking for an ounce of understanding.

“Quiet,” White orders, frown thick with disappointment. “I knew that you weren’t ready for this.”

“No! This is my colony, you can’t take it away-!” Pink protests.

“You’ve lost the kindergarten, your communications are shutdown. Blue Diamond was attacked. Your soldiers are falling to pearls and defects. You are losing.” Yellow reminds her.

“Please… It looks bad now but I can rebuild, I promise! I’ve a new kindergarten in Facet 9 – a few leads on their location, I can hunt them out – shatter them, you can’t take my colony away from me!” Pink pleads.

White inhales, and for a moment, her eyes flick down to Blue and Yellow standing at her side. Blue nods, Yellow sighs, but offers a sharp jerk of the chin. Still, White waits a moment longer, considering.

“One last chance.”

Pink gasps in exhausted relief.

“But,” White warns, “we will be watching you, all of us, and don’t think that we will be as lenient if you continue to fail us and make the Authority look weak.”

She approaches Pink, until she stands so close that they could kiss, but no situation has ever been less intimate. White radiates icy disapproval. “I do not wish to be made to look _weak_ , Pink. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, my Diamond,” Pink whispers. She is shaking so hard that as White leaves, the sound of the door swishing shut makes her flinch. Her haunted eyes find Yellow, who is hesitating.

“Be thankful she’s going easy on you,” mutters Yellow, and follows.


	16. orange

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink meets her Jasper.

The Beta Kindergarten is full of failures, and Homeworld’s last hope for Earth. The sky is tainted a permanent shade of bloody tangerine, and the crumbling dusty sandstone of the kindergarten walls slopes and wavers in reddish lines. It is very hot, so hot that the ground shimmers from the heat and the baked soil is split and hazed with cracks. Or perhaps it is the grains of the soldiers shattered here barely minutes after their emergence into the battleground frontier against the Crystal Gems that glitters and catches the light until the whole kindergarten appears to sparkle subtly like mica-flecked brown marble.

Pink Diamond’s palanquin, unusually guarded by a squadron of anxious rubies, waits only a scrambling distance from the warp pad to safety. The protective metal cage is up, locking the occupants within and the rest of the world out, and the coloured silks hanging opaquely heavy stir listlessly in the dry hot breeze. The Beta soldiers line in sweating ranks, missing the biggest of their sisters.

The Facet Nine Kindergarten Quartz That Could is inside the hot closeness of the palanquin instead, standing stiffly at parade rest, back straight, shoulders squared, head tilted up proudly but not disrespectfully. Her orange skin is dappled with off-colour red stripes that mimics the curved sandy walls of her kindergarten. Her blush darkens her skin to the colour of sequoia bark.

“You shattered eighty gems in the first day, I hear,” Pink purrs, all flirtatious undercurrents. She reclines on her smoothly-polished, sinuously-carved throne in the orange-tinted light shining through the curtains, surveying Jasper with a heavy-lidded look. Her lashes brush her flushed rosy cheeks when she blinks. “…  _Impressive,_ for a lone jasper.”

“My Diamond, I will not give up until every last one of those filthy traitors has seen your justice,” her Jasper vows, lifting eyes as fierce and intense as the heart of exploding volcanoes to Pink’s own. Like magma, they are orange, hot.

“My Jasper… With that look in your eyes, I almost believe you could win the war for both of us.”

“I will fight with the fury of thirty jaspers for you, my Diamond.”

“If only I had thirty of you, I could feel safe.” Pink bites her words off, her eyes widening at her slip. Her knuckles tighten until they go white.

 “My purpose is to be your weapon, my Diamond, I would shatter before I failed you.”

Pink inhales. “Why do I believe you? As if White spoke…”

“I can only have been made to serve one Diamond,” Jasper reminds her, and Pink closes her eyes and shudders briefly.

She beckons Jasper closer with a gesture. Swallowing, Jasper obeys; a swift hand lifts her up to Pink’s face. Involuntarily, Jasper steadies herself with a broad palm on the bridge of her Diamond’s nose, stiffens in sudden terror. The pad of an enormous pink finger caresses the tangles of her long hair, soothingly.

“I want to keep you, my Jasper.”

“I am already yours, My Diamond.”


	17. viridian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink is summoned to peace talks with Rose Quartz.

At home, a quartz summoning a Diamond to peace negotiations would be laughable. But Earth isn’t Homeworld, and Pink Diamond isn’t laughing.

The sky is a peculiar teal, vivid, fresh, wet, like undried paint. The springy grasses of Rose Quartz’s meadow are thickly green, tinted blue by the stormy afternoon, like rippling bottle-green waves. The air smells clean and clear. A muggy humidity clings close.

Pink’s palanquin, with five Rubies allowed as guards, picks towards the Crystal Gems. Pink longs for Jasper, but she fears Rose’s insidious wiles can tempt her more easily than slow-witted Rubies.

Rose Quartz has a sheathed sword and welcoming smile, flanked by the Renegade Pearl and a fusion. Pink wants Rose to be obviously defective, but Rose looks so like her sisters that Pink wonders what went wrong.

“Pink Diamond!” Rose beams. “A pleasure to see you, albeit with unfortunate circumstances.”

 “Traitor, how dare you speak to me like I’m – a lowly… gem like you?” Thrown off by Rose’s unexpected warmth, Pink’s attempted retort sounds more whiny than threatening. She winces.

Rose’s smile doesn’t falter. “We’re all gems here able to speak.”

“Speak then,” Pink bites, trying to salvage some respect. They all know Rose is the one in control.

“I have an offer for you,” says Rose, bluntly, “To end this unnecessary bloodshed. We don’t _want_ to fight you, Pink Diamond, and every pointlessly shattered gem in this war grieves us deeply.”

“It’s a shame that your armies don’t follow your philosophy,” Pink snaps, thinking of her many casualties to the Crystal Gems.

“My companions have rescued every gem cracked in battle, and they are protected,” Rose says. They both know Pink can’t say the same. “Accept my offer, and I will release every gem loyal to Homeworld, healed by my own hand if needed, safely back to you.”

Pink swallows. It is a cruelly handsome proposition; thinking of having her favoured and loyal gems restored to her makes her heart ache with deep desire. “What do you want?” she asks, warily.

“Many of us still cannot help but love you dearly,” Rose suggests, softly, “And would welcome your protective hand to guide and advise us in a new Republic of Earth. All we ask is that gem production on Earth be permanently stopped, and Homeworld troops to withdraw. We want no Diamond interference but yours, only yours.”

The flattery is masterfully done; Pink Diamond’s young cheeks flush with pleasure. “But… an advisor?”

Rose’s smile turns conspiratorial. “Surely a Diamond as clever and beautiful as you finds the minutiae of old Homeworld rules a little… _outdated?”_

They _are_ terribly boring. Wavering, Pink bites her lip. White will be so proud of her for ending the war, she will forget she is angry and everything will go back to normal, as Pink craves.

Sensing her hesitation, Rose adds encouragingly, “Maybe it’s time for a change, Pink Diamond.”

Pink flinches violently, and her sudden, unreasoning terror jumps to only one conclusion. Instantaneously, Pink’s scythe appears.

_“NO!”_


	18. pink

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pink Diamond is shattered.

For almost three seconds, Pink Diamond basks in the shocked fear in the Crystal Gems’ eyes as she stands, silhouetted against a blueish sky purpled with storm clouds, her scythe whistling through the air with the finality of a guillotine.

By the fourth second, the illusion of power vanishes.

The scythe’s point buries an inch deep into Rose’s brilliant pink shield. The quartz’s teeth are bared, feet digging into the ground, but her arms aren’t shaking. Rose’s pitying dark eyes challenge hers. She shoves hard. Pink’s scythe explodes into fragments of light.

There is another, brighter, flash. Pink staggers away from an enormous warhammer cracking down on her head. She trips over her palanquin and sprawls ungracefully - the warhammer smashes down again. Pink shrieks, instinctively twisting to protect her gem. The blow lands on her hip - a _crack_ of bones and white hot flares of pain.  Watery eyed, Pink stares up at the fusion who has so clearly aimed directly for her gem, stunned incoherent. Attack a Diamond? A fusion?

“Rose, the rubies!” The fusion bellows, the pearl on her forehead gleaming brilliantly above her bucktooth grimace as she raises the warhammer again.

“What have I ever done to you?!” Pink is shaking, tears quivering in her eyes.

The hit connects with a _crack_ and a _scream._

Pain. Violent, jagged, senseless, she’s sobbing, twisting, and Sardonyx’s face is close, snarling, _“For Biggs, for Citrine-”_ Each name comes with a punch against her gem, her beautiful, cracking gem. Pink wails snot-clogged tears like a spanked child, screeches for White, Jasper, _anyone_.

She gets the rubies instead. Fused, they wrench Sardonyx from her, meaty fists curling around the fusion’s thick hips. Shamefully, Pink crawls away, dragging herself with shivering, whimpering cries at each agonising movement. She can barely see through blurry eyes, but all of her focus is on getting away, away, back to safety. Pink spares no thought for the rubies, let the Crystal Gems shatter them, if only they spare Pink.

But Pink has forgotten about Rose.

Plants erupt from the ground and snare around her wrists and ankles, lashing over her body in thick ropes. Terrified, she wriggles, subsiding with pained gasps as her movement grates her cracked gem. Rose’s feet land feather-light on her spine.

Scared, hurting, on her belly, trapped and cracked in the dirt, Pink bawls. The last of her courage puddles around her and she begs, pleads, threatens.

“You left me no choice!” Rose cries, tortured, “We could have done this _together!”_

The thorny vines have soft little flowerbuds, and as the weeping Rose draws her sword, they begin to bloom. Transfixed, Pink stares as the flowers begin to unfold, soft magenta and candyfloss pink hibiscus, amaranth, peonies, and roses. Their scent uncurls delicately, sweetly pretty like pearls, yet far more transient. Pink holds her breath, captivated by their vivacity.

“It’s so beautiful,” she hiccups, tears forgotten.

“It is,” Rose agrees, then her sword plunges directly down.

Pink Diamond shatters amidst a riot of roses.


End file.
